


Heat Longs for Cold

by AdelaCathcart



Series: Violators [5]
Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Adultery, Barnard-Stokes Business, Daemon Hurting, Dry Humping, F/M, Geology, Public Sex, museum sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:15:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22678582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdelaCathcart/pseuds/AdelaCathcart
Summary: The truth is that there are long stretches of time in which he doesn’t think of her at all. For hours, sometimes an entire day or near, his obsessive focus is directed towards a political matter, an impending expedition, a breakthrough he feels himself building to, and his mind is on fire with the ecstasy of action, of shaping the world to match the better image of itself which he’s already forged in his dreams. And if the dark-glittering porphyry shard in his microscope reminds him of her triumphant eyes, then the jolt passing through him only fuels his passion for the work, and the ache of desire is not for flesh on flesh but for the solution, somewhere, extant but temporarily obscured, waiting only for him to seize it and slot it into place.
Relationships: Lord Asriel/Marisa Coulter
Series: Violators [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610350
Comments: 7
Kudos: 32





	Heat Longs for Cold

**Author's Note:**

> “If the fall of man consists in the separation of god and the devil the serpent must have appeared out of the middle of the apple when Eve bit like the original worm in it, splitting it in half and sundering everything which was once one into a pair of opposites, so the world is Noah's ark on the sea of eternity containing all the endless pairs of things, irreconcilable and inseparable, and heat will always long for cold and the back for the front and smiles for tears and mutt for jeff and no for yes with the most unutterable nostalgia there is.” —Diane Arbus
> 
> Asriel: "What do you know about your mother?"  
> Lyra: "You really took adventuring in the frozen wastelands to a whole new level, didn't you?"  
> Asriel: "Frozen wastelands? Fucking her was like fucking a volcano."  
> Lyra: "Gross."  
> —Chrys Reviews, His Dark Materials Season 1 Episode 8

The truth is that there are long stretches of time in which he doesn’t think of her at all. For hours, sometimes an entire day or near, his obsessive focus is directed towards a political matter, an impending expedition, a breakthrough he feels himself building to, and his mind is on fire with the ecstasy of action, of shaping the world to match the better image of itself which he’s already forged in his dreams. And if the dark-glittering porphyry shard in his microscope reminds him of her triumphant eyes, then the jolt passing through him only fuels his passion for the work, and the ache of desire is not for flesh on flesh but for the solution, somewhere, extant but temporarily obscured, waiting only for him to seize it and slot it into place.

The porphyry excites him so much that he nearly forgets to sleep, chipping flake after flake from the samples of volcanic rock he collected on a trip to Fennoscandia two months ago. He had been hired to survey an unexplored region likely to be rich in diamond-bearing kimberlites, leading a team of geologists who would collect samples and take readings from the uncharted area, and then analyze the data and prepare a recommendation before their sponsor invested in full-scale mining operations there. The money was good and there was no harm in being owed a favor by a diamond mine, but he’d accepted the posting because it offered an opportunity to pursue, without arousing unnecessary suspicion, a certain theory he’d been toying with for some time—research which had the potential to be branded as irredeemably heretical, curtailed and even outlawed, were it brought to the attention of the Magisterium. Therefore while the gaggle of scientists busied themselves in the field, he’d taken advantage of their provisional access to the region to collect a few samples of his own. Until tonight those samples had lain nestled in straw packing under the false bottom of a case stuffed with his most unremarkable mountaineering equipment, inert with unfathomable age and more dangerous than any bomb: the clotted blood of the earth itself, with inclusions unlike any from this world.

Asriel passes a hand over his eyes. Outside the window birds chorus and the sky is streaked with lilac. “Bed,” Stelmaria reminds him. He obeys.

The faintest hint of neroli still clings to the pillow. Cool air from outside soothes the fire in his head, and her ghost drags him softly down to oblivion.

When he wakes it’s early afternoon and he knows exactly what to do.

The Royal Geological Museum hosts a small army of visiting scholars, researchers and lecturers in addition to their full-time staff, and it’s to their temporary offices on the fifth floor of the building that Asriel makes his way. Dr. Atefeh Reza had once been a Jordan scholar but completed her studies at the Cosmological Institute of Tehran, returning to Brytain late last year as the Museum’s senior research fellow in the department of lithometeorology. He knows he can rely on her expertise and her perspicacity, as well as her discretion, if it comes to that. She’s finishing a late lunch at her desk when she bids him enter, and if she’s at all surprised to see him it doesn’t show. Her condor dæmon is stoic on his perch by the window, and merely blinks at Asriel and Stelmaria as they come in.

“Sorry, sorry,” says Dr. Reza, chewing, waving her hand in front of her face as she stands. She’s nearly as tall as he is. She swallows and shakes his hand. “Lord Asriel, an unexpected pleasure. What brings you to the museum?”

“Atefeh, you’re looking well,” he says, and sits. He takes a walnut-sized rock from his breast pocket and sets it on the desk between them. “I wonder if I could trouble you to have a look at this.”

“You came all the way up here for that? So I’m guessing it’s not a bit of quartz you found in the garden.” She holds the rock close to her face, rummaging blindly in the desk drawer for a loupe, which she fits to her eye with a squint. “Hmmm.”

“It’s from Belomoria, in arctic Muscovy. I picked it up there while on a geological survey last fall.”

“It looks like a fairly ordinary igneous rock fragment. This could be a bit of garnet here on the bottom. Weren’t there geologists on the team with you when you found it? Or why not ask Dr. Carnarvon at Oxford? You must see him pretty often, I should think.”

“Carnarvon’s too conservative to tell me what I want to know. And that’s not garnet.”

She raises a long black eyebrow, dropping the loupe into her palm. “Oh?”

“As a matter of fact I don’t know what it is. But I do know that it doesn’t match the geological record of the area. There is no way this stone could have been formed at that location.”

“So it was brought there.”

“I don’t think so. It was embedded in a greenstone belt over a billion years old.”

“A meteorite,” she suggests, but he can see she’s already thinking bigger.

“You tell me.”

Dr. Reza stares past him for a moment with her face in her fist, tapping the stone absently against her blotter. Her condor fluffs his huge dark wings and wheezes. Then she says: “Can I borrow this sample? I’d like to run it through some equipment we have here at the Museum lab. After hours, of course.”

“Certainly. I’ll be very interested to hear your findings.”

Asriel leaves his card, and shows himself out before she can change her mind.

Surety of purpose shot him like a bullet directly from his bed to the museum, and once there a little-used service stairwell, chosen specifically for its lack of scenery, had led him straight up to Dr. Reza’s office, but now that his mission is accomplished he feels effusive, and he takes the broad grand staircase leisurely down. From here he has a view of the museum’s main gallery, tall cathedral-style windows reaching towards the vaulted ceiling, a monument to man’s ingenuity, illuminated by the light of reason. And all his own work, the freezing cold and sleepless nights, the innumerable personal sacrifices, will be in service of the same great end, the expansion of the sum total of human understanding. No purpose on earth could be more noble—it is the altar on which he will without reservation surrender all he has.

“Asriel, wait.”

With a silent leap Stelmaria is halfway down the flight of stairs to the landing, effortless but for the little tug in his chest. As he hurries after, she rises with her big paws on the marble balustrade. She sniffs the air, and Asriel scans the gallery below, and both recognize them at the same time: the golden monkey pacing the length of the café by the museum’s eastern entrance, and Mrs. Coulter moodily sipping from a cup of chocolatl, her ankles crossed under her chair.

His eyes want to bounce off her like he’s touched something hot. Her appearance is glamorous and remote as ever, but he feels the echo of her soft thighs on his face, the dirty metallic taste of sweat under her arm. Now that he knows she’s there it feels indecent to look. Is her husband with her? Asriel almost hopes so. It would be as well to have the inevitable confrontation now when they can still be reasonable. But no, she holds a book open on the table before her: she’s unaccompanied. Better yet.

It’s only natural that a stolen moment with his lover should be the reward for his discovery. How neatly the universe has once again transformed his wants to facts.

Stelmaria ambles nearly underfoot so he can’t rush the rest of the way downstairs. By the time they reach the first floor he has a plan. He strolls southwards down the main gallery, pausing at the mouth of the café like he’s checking the chalk menu for the special. He waits until she reaches up to turn a page, and her gaze wanders, to be snagged by a flick of Stelmaria’s long tail. Their eyes click together like magnets.

They hold that gaze for as long as they dare to, and half a moment longer, and then Asriel turns deliberately away and continues toward the south wing of the museum. He passes through the dark Hall of Prehistoric Peoples, with its skulls and dioramas, and in the center, clinging to each other agelessly, the naked man and woman, shining artifacts of the past. He waits in their shadow, and when she passes he plucks at her sleeve.

“Let's go to a hotel.”

“It’s broad daylight,” she says with her back to him, pretending to examine a painting of the archaeological site where some of the items in the room were sourced.

“We’ll take the door by the lecture hall. Only scholars ever use it and then only in the evening. It’s beneath the observatory—“

“Thank you, I know where it is. The fact is I’m having dinner with Edward in an hour.”

“Ah.” It would be beneath him to be jealous; if anything pity has made him more kindly disposed toward the man, at least on the rare occasions when her husband crosses his mind. Coulter is a minor inconvenience, to be unceremoniously removed from the path of Asriel’s ambition when the time is right, and not before. Right now it’s not a priority. To show he isn’t bothered, he checks his pocket watch. “Hadn’t you better catch an omnibus pretty soon, if you want to be home in time?”

“I’m meeting him at a restaurant near here, if you must know, and I certainly won’t tell you which one.”

“I don’t think I asked.”

“Yes, how good of you.” She turns and looks into his eyes, and he returns her gaze coolly. They keep walking.

The next room holds a hulking blob of sky iron the size of an elephant, and a photogram of the crater it made when it fell, twenty miles wide. From there a sharp right turn leads to another exhibit, almost another world.

This room is deep, but not tall. Mushroom-colored carpet covers the tiered sunken areas of the floor which form soft natural stairs down to room-like depressions; it embraces the columns and even creeps partway up the walls, gently dampening all sound in this dim space. Carpeted platforms, lit by recessed spotlights, display massive freestanding specimens of petrified wood and geodes large enough for a man to climb inside. Luminous cases flush with the walls hold every type of mineral imaginable, irregular and geometric forms, gorgeous translucent pinks and greens, dull steely blues, glinting silvers and bright golds of every shape and size.

Asriel makes a circuit of the cavelike Hall of Minerals, passing through the three connected side rooms containing manmade gems and precious artifacts. There’s just one other patron: an elderly man sits in one of the depressions, sketching a large and complicated crystal formation with his hedgehog dæmon snuffling at his side, looking like he’s been there for hours and will stay for hours more. Asriel can only hope the man’s a little deaf. When he turns back to the hall’s entrance, Mrs. Coulter is there, examining a case of cut jade. With practiced disinterest she looks at and then past him, and proceeds to the first of the side rooms. As if he forgot something, Asriel doubles back into the third.

She cuts through the intervening chamber like a juggernaut; her mouth is on his as she slams him against the wall. Their teeth clash painfully at the impact. There’s a desperation in her caresses that he hasn’t felt before. She’s kissing him too deeply, barely letting him breathe, and he tastes the bitter chocolatl and tears on the back of her tongue. For a time he can only try to keep his balance as she batters him, like a cliff in a storm. He holds her firmly and returns her kisses with equal force, but she wants more—she wants a fight. Her arms lock around his shoulders. She pulls him down and bites his neck.

He recoils but the pain is wonderful.

This time, Stelmaria doesn’t hesitate to strike first. With her broad paw she gives the monkey a clout that throws him into the carpeted wall, and when he lands face-first and crouches to spring she slaps him down again. Her teeth meet in the scruff of his neck, grinding him harshly into the floor. Marisa’s knees buckle.

Asriel takes her whole weight and pushes her to the wall, kicking her feet apart and leaning into her. He can feel the heat radiating through the fabric of her woolen skirt, through the leg of his trousers, imagines fragrant steam condensing like breath on his thigh. Arms double-clasped at her waist he holds her upper body in place, his mouth working lazily at the crook of her neck, as she rolls her hips against him, letting out high sweet sighs.

“Come home with me,” he murmurs into her skin.

He feels the little shake of her head. “No, now. Here,” she gasps. In the Hall of Minerals the old man coughs, rustling his papers. Asriel tries to look round but Marisa’s arms are tight enough to choke him, and she’s grinding into him so hard it’s actually chafing his leg. He hoists her by the backs of her thighs directly onto his erection, sawing his whole rigid length against her in long strokes through their clothes. Her protests are just moans now. She’s biting his jacket, soaking muffled pleas into the tweed.

Stelmaria lifts the monkey by the nape and gives him a bone-rattling shake. Marisa’s moans become a long, muted whimper and her body stiffens for a long moment, then she gives some last hard thrusts and collapses against him with a sob. It’s too rough to bring him off with her, but now she cups him through his trousers and the stinging pain recedes, with hot aching pleasure underneath. There are low voices in the exhibit now, and carefully Asriel releases her and moves to put space between them. Marisa leans back, eyes closed, palms flat against the wall, exhilarated. There’s a dark spot of saliva on the breast of her ice-blue jacket.

The voices are a family, parents and a child, and the little girl is asking about a famous pink sapphire the size of her fist, which Asriel can plainly see in the display case by his lover’s head. He turns briskly back to the exhibit hall and trots down into the lower tiered area recently vacated by the sketching man, always sure to angle his body away from the interlopers. When Marisa follows him she limps.

Asriel leans against a column on the far side of the crystal, where he can keep an eye on the other people in the exhibit while he wills his erection to go down. Marisa descends and stands with her back to him as if for cover, but then she takes a backwards step, mashing him into the column with her body. She reaches over her shoulder to grab his lapel and pull him lower, drawing his head to her shoulder, aligning them, trapping his cock between her hip and her palm. “Don’t move. Don’t look. Just let me...” she whispers, stroking his hair. She’s incredibly persuasive, and he surrenders, hiding his face in her neck like a shy child. At any rate, as she's wont to remind him, it’s her life and not his on the line.

She’s softly shaking her head, cooing “shh—shh—” as she smoothly rocks her hips, and her flesh is so warm and yielding even through her clothes, as if the only purpose of her body is to make him sink into it and disappear. And it is, he remembers, reeling: the reason nature made her beautiful is so he’ll long for her, seek her out, pour himself into her, mindlessly as water flowing downhill. So he does.

His orgasm is more relief than pleasure, and the return to his senses is hideous. Asriel sinks to the stair and rests his elbows on his spread knees, his forehead in the heels of his hands. Marisa stays put, not looking at him, hands clasped behind her back.

“What brought you to the museum today?” she asks, insultingly casual. The family is nearby again. Asriel can see the parents’ dæmons now, a dove and a bullfrog: sedate, incurious people, nothing to worry about. The little girl is trying to touch the geode. Of the four adults who see it happening, not one moves to stop her.

“I had a question for a colleague.”

“And it couldn’t wait. You had to ask in person. What was it about, I wonder?”

“Don’t tell me you’re interested in my work.”

“You were so concerned about my intellect going to waste, the least you can do is indulge my curiosity. I promise I’ll try to keep up.”

He ignores that, unable resist explaining his discovery to her. “I found a rock that shouldn’t exist—“

A wail emanates from above. The girl’s hand is bleeding. Her baffled parents hurry her out of the exhibit hall. Shaken by the sudden noise, Marisa peeks at her watch and winces. “Oh, damn, damn it. I have to go.” She pulls a compact from her bag and peers into it skeptically, sweeping powder across her sweaty forehead. “Is this salvageable, do you think?”

“Let me,” he says, gently straightening the combs in her hair. “Though maybe I'd be better off letting him catch you.”

“Would you like that, Asriel? For me to wash up on your doorstep, ruined and destitute, begging you to take me in?” Her tone is bitter but she looks genuinely amused. “How vile.”

Again he shrugs off the goad. “No,” he says, rubbing smeared lipstick from her chin with his thumb. “No, what I want is…” _For you to choose me._ “… Your happiness, I suppose.”

She laughs and kisses him quickly, a goodbye. “No one in the whole history of the world has wanted that.” A swipe of fresh lipstick and she tucks the compact away. “Least of all me. Passable?”

“Perfection. Like it never happened.” He offers her his arm and they climb out of the pit together.

“But it did happen. Nothing can change that.”

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic was inspired by the beautiful Guggenheim Hall of Minerals/Morgan Memorial Hall of Gems, until recently at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. These exhibits have been redesigned but they will never be forgotten. I for one will forever regret not getting the chance to fuck in them. 
> 
> If any geologists are reading, please accept my apology. I failed high school science then majored in painting in college, and am therefore uniquely ill-equipped to do justice to your noble discipline. Your suggestions are welcome. Know that I did try my best.
> 
> Jordan might think they’re an all-male college, but they can’t know that for certain. 
> 
> Whether or not Leonard Cohen exists in Lyra's World, "Everybody Knows" is an immutable constant of the multiverse.
> 
> Marisa's jacket: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/155701


End file.
